Les Bonnes Choses

I've been reading. I just finished reading Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which was a remarkably fast and enjoyable read. I received a book called The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, in my stocking this past Christmas. Apparently, Carnegie Mellon had a series of lectures called The Last Lecture, where speakers were invited to pass on their wisdom for the ages, as though it were their last chance to be heard. In the case of Randy Pausch, when he gave the lecture on September 18, 2007 (my birthday), he did so knowing that it was his last lecture because he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died July 25, 2008. I'm going to go ahead and read the book, but damn, that's just the most depressing way to start off a book. It doesn't help much that the book is peppered with photos and such of him with his three young kids. I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect of my vocation, but I very often find myself putting myself inside someone else's head. It's very useful when trying to figure out what the hell people are doing (or are going to do) when they're taking part in psychological experiments (which often require perfectly normal people to do rather bizarre things). But sometimes empathy is a real pain in the ass.

Maybe I should just read the volumes of research put out by the people I will be visiting in San Diego on Monday. I doubt I'll feel too much one way or another while reading Neurophysiological evidence for transfer appropriate processing of memory: processing versus feature similarity.

I like lobster, however I seldom eat it. There are two reasons for that: expense, and the fact that Rebecca doesn't like any invertebrate seafood. I can't do much about the second factor, however it appears that the first factor has been mitigated somewhat by an oversupply of PEI lobster. Now that I think about it, the last time I had lobster, it was in PEI. That was about 8 or 9 years ago. Wow. Next time I'm at Sunripe, my new favourite store, I'm going to look into it. It might be worth making two dinners one night.

I know it's unethical, because he cannot give informed consent, but as my son, Pokey's life to date is a bit of an experiment. Though he is quite articulate for a 2-year-old, his language development has taken a bit of an odd turn by virtue of the fact that we often choose to use a bizarre selection of words around our house, and indeed also at his nana and papa's house. Of course, I tend to associate with like-minded people who have similarly thrown off the shackles of normalcy. One of my good friends, John, was good enough to give Jude a plush toy for Christmas a few weeks back. It's a plush Cthulhu. If you're not familiar with Cthulhu, here's what this demon devourer of souls looks like, according to the mythology:

Plush vacation Cthulhu looks a little different though. And has become Jude's favourite movie-watching buddy. It is customary for Cthulhu to dance to the opening Sheryl Crow song, Real Gone when watching the Disney/Pixar Cars movie.
All in all, Cthulhu has been a good childhood friend while on his vacation from devouring souls, though he is a bit of a shark at playing cards and dices.

I just edited my first Wikipedia page. Okay, maybe edit is too strong of a word. I corrected the improper use of the word 'their' (when the author meant 'there' -- one of my pet peeves.). But it was really easy to do. I could see how someone with an anal-retentive streak like mine could get hooked on editing wikipedia pages. I don't know the stupid syntax - wiki uses its own markup, which gets converted into HTML so that people don't have to learn HTML. Of course, I know HTML, so you can probably see the perverseness in my learning wiki markup. And that's why I won't become a compulsive wiki editor, so you can cancel that intervention you were planning.

I failed at pizza. The other day I used a pizza kit to try to make a 'homemade' pizza. The kit, I believe produced by Kraft, contained a pizza dough flour mix (just add water and let it rise), tomato sauce, some dried herbs (just oregano, I think) and Parmesan cheese. I've tried to make a pizza crust from scratch before. I sucked then too. I can make the dough well enough. My problem is in taking the ball of risen dough and turning it into a pizza crust. I can't make a round flat crust without overworking the dough, which I think undoes the rising process by pressing all the CO2 out. I can't get the crust uniformly thick, either. Instead I get some spots that are way too thick, and others that are thin to the point of becoming holes. It's all very frustrating, and nothing like I must have learned from television in my childhood with the throwing spinning disks of dough into the air. On one hand, I could avoid all that frustration by giving up and just buying the ready-made crusts from the store. But then I'd never learn how to do it, and it bugs me that I can't figure it out. If anyone can show me how to make a proper pizza crust, I'd be happy to apprentice.

Speaking as a geek, and as someone who has made excessively elabourate cakes, I can appreciate how awesome this birthday must have been for the celebrant who got this cake:



However, if you check out the rest of the flikr images associated with the cake, you might wonder whether the birthday boy and his friends realize they have allowed themselves to become caricatures.

Lots going on in '09. First off, there's all those things that are supposed to happen by 2010 that have to get taken care of. I couldn't find an online list, but I imagine there were quite a few outlandish prognostications made 10, 25 and 50 years ago.

My own prediction for the upcoming year is that things are going to get up-ended around here. I'm jetting down to San Diego in a couple of weeks to check out Jeff Elman's digs. I'm not entirely sure what that says about the likelihood of me getting an offer for a postdoc, but that's sort of what I'm banking on because I haven't heard back about any of the faculty positions to which I applied (which means I'll have to wait until March to start getting the "we like you, but just as a friend" letters). And of course, on top of that, Rebecca will be giving birth to the child now referred to as Tricky Monkey in the middle of all this, possibly at about the time that we're selling our house.

2009 is going to be a big production.